Verena Blok’s Love Shit takes self-determination as its subject, approaching it through both documentary photography and text. Over a two-year period, Blok made intimate portraits of pregnant individuals, and these images are joined by stories she gathered while working at an abortion clinic in the Netherlands. The book considers the dilemmas that surround procreation—pregnancy that is wanted or not, motherhood, childhood—and seeks to reveal the complexities of womanhood through an honest, unfiltered lens.

The book is designed by Sandra Kassenaar, whose design brings the photographs and collected stories together. Published by Fw:Books, the edition is a softcover of 80 pages, in English, with dimensions of 22 by 30 centimeters. It was published in 2025. The project combines portraits made over two years with stories gathered at a Dutch abortion clinic, bringing image and testimony into the same volume.

By pairing documentary photography with collected stories, Love Shit treats its subject through sustained attention to individual experience. The two-year engagement and the clinic-based stories ground the work in specific circumstances rather than general statements. The combination of photographs and texts makes the volume an example of contemporary documentary practice.

Love Shit engages social and personal experience through portraits, stories, and the relationships between them. The publisher describes the book as an exploration of the dilemmas surrounding procreation, presented through an honest and unfiltered lens. The pairing asks a reader to move between what a portrait makes visible and what a written account can disclose. Neither form needs to stand in for the whole of a person’s experience. Read together, they allow the subject of self-determination to remain connected to particular lives, rather than becoming an abstract proposition about pregnancy or motherhood.